15 Unforgettable Facts About Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

BY Eric D Snider

March 31, 2016

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has earned a place in moviegoers’ hearts, not to mention plenty of “best movies of the 21st-century” lists. The mind-bending romantic dramedy with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet is the perfect pairing of bizarre screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) and whimsical French director Michel Gondry, whose unique vision would later be seen in The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind. To enhance your next viewing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, here are some details you might not know, or that maybe you used to know before you paid someone to erase them.

1. YOU CAN THANK MOTHER NATURE FOR THAT CLASSIC SCENE ON THE FROZEN LAKE.

The script called for snow and ice, but Gondry was prepared to omit such details if the weather didn’t cooperate. Luckily, New York State had a fierce winter that year, and the lake froze over as hoped. Carrey and Winslet lying next to a crack in the ice would become one of the film’s iconic images.

2. MICHEL GONDRY ENJOYS BEING FORCED TO IMPROVISE.

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Unlike most filmmakers, who prefer to control every aspect of their films, Gondry likes it when unexpected problems such as weather issues force him to think on the fly. It keeps you on your toes, he says in the DVD commentary: “It makes everybody work faster, with more energy.” We’re guessing not everyone on the crew feels the same way.

3. THE IDEA CAME FROM A FRENCH ARTIST FRIEND OF GONDRY’S.

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Artist Pierre Bismuth is credited as a co-writer of the Eternal Sunshine story. Gondry explained in an interview that Bismuth “had the concept of sending a card to people mentioning they had been erased from the memory of someone they thought they knew. He wanted to study their reaction as part of an art experiment.” Bismuth eventually opted not to pursue the project, but Gondry liked the concept and enlisted the artist’s aid in developing a story around it, which Charlie Kaufman then turned into a script. The three men were rewarded for their efforts with the 2005 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

4. MOST OF THE VISUAL TRICKS WERE DONE THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY.

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There’s a scene 57 minutes into the movie where Joel (Carrey), in his memory, watches himself meet with Dr. HowardMierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) earlier that day. The camera shows Joel observing, then pans over to the desk where the doctor and the other Joel are sitting, then pans back to the first Joel again. No digital trickery here: Gondry had Jim Carrey run back and forth behind the camera, quickly donning and doffing his hat and coat to play the different versions of himself.

5. MEMENTO MADE KAUFMAN NERVOUS.

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Kaufman and Gondry had been pitching their film since 1998, two years before Christopher Nolan’s Memento arrived with its similarly fractured narrative about memory and loss. When Memento started making waves, Kaufman says he got nervous. “I totally freaked out,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t do this anymore,’ and I called Michel and said, ‘I am not doing it,’ then we called [producer] Steve Golin and said, ‘We’re not doing it.’ Steve Golin was very angry and said, ‘You are doing it!’ So we did it. I wasn’t influenced by Memento except in that way." (If you’ve seen Adaptation, you can imagine Kaufman worrying himself sick about something like this.)

6. IN THE SCRIPT, THE LACUNA OFFICE WAS IN THE SAME BUILDING AS THE ONE IN BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.

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Kaufman added that detail “for fun, for myself.” But it turned out to be unfeasible to use the same building for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so it didn’t pan out.

7. THE SCREENPLAY ORIGINALLY BEGAN 50 YEARS IN THE FUTURE.

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It began with an old woman—later revealed to be Mary, Kirsten Dunst’s character—trying to publish a manuscript called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, implied to be a tell-all about Lacuna. At the end of the screenplay, we discover that Mary is still working for Howard (who’s very, very old), and that Clementine has had Joel erased from her memory at least 15 times over the decades.

8. CLEMENTINE’S DIFFERENT HAIR COLORS WERE ACHIEVED THROUGH WIGS, NOT DYEING.

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Kate Winslet, ever the trouper, was willing to dye her hair. But since the film (like almost all films) wasn’t shot sequentially, she sometimes had to have different colors on the same day, so dyeing wasn’t practical. “Literally some days I would start with red, and then by lunchtime I would be blue, and then the afternoon I’d be going back to red again.” (She said the red one was her favorite, by the way.)

9. GONDRY APPROACHED NICOLAS CAGE TO PLAY THE LEAD.

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As Gondry put it, “Every independent director who wanted to make a commercial movie asked Nicolas Cage to be in their movie after Leaving Las Vegas, except he would only do one out of 10 of those projects.” It’s sobering to realize there was a time when Nicolas Cage was selective.

10. WE GOT TO MEET JOEL’S EX-GIRLFRIEND NAOMI IN A DELETED SCENE.

Joel makes several references to his ex, Naomi, the one he was living with when he met Clementine. He even considers getting back together with her. We never see her in the finished movie, but the character was in a few scenes in the original version (including a post-breakup hook-up). And her voice, provided by Ellen Pompeo, is heard over the phone in a deleted scene.

11. GONDRY DIDN’T REALIZE HOW REALISTIC HIS MOVIE WAS UNTIL HIS GIRLFRIEND LEFT HIM.

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She dumped him during the editing process (ouch!), and he says that makes the movie too sad for him to watch anymore. But the experience also made him see the film’s accuracy. Gondry had thought the moment when Joel throws all of Clementine’s stuff into a garbage bag was “a stereotype.” Then, when his own girlfriend left him, “I lived it! I had to put all my stuff in a cardboard box and send it back to Los Angeles, and I thought, ‘OK, now I understand what the movie was saying.’”

12. IT LED TO KANYE WEST’S “GOLD DIGGER.”

Composer Jon Brion had never done anything in the hip-hop world until Kanye West, impressed by his Eternal Sunshine score, asked him to collaborate. They had the basics of “Gold Digger” laid down after the first day.

13. EVERYONE WAS ENCOURAGED TO IMPROVISE—EVERYONE EXCEPT JIM CARREY.

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Not because he was too much of a ham, but because his character is reserved and un-spontaneous. This led to some frustration on Carrey’s part, especially when Gondry was urging Winslet, Dunst, and Mark Ruffalo to cut loose with their characters.“Sometimes, I had to talk to Kate Winslet in a different room and tell her, ‘Go as big as you want! This is a comedy!’ And to Jim, I’d say, ‘This is a drama, not a comedy,'" Gondry told The Daily Beast. "Jim was very frustrated while we were shooting it.”

14. THEY MADE IT LOOK LIKE THE TIDE WAS COMING IN TO THE BEACH HOUSE AT THE END BY BUILDING A HOUSE ON THE BEACH AND LETTING THE TIDE COME IN.

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Sometimes the simplest explanations are the right ones. Most of the film’s effects are practical, not digital, and that was true of the rising water in the beach house, too.

15. IT MIGHT NOT BE FICTION MUCH LONGER.

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In 2014, scientists reported that they’d successfully manipulated mice’s memories, or at least the emotions associated with those memories. See, we form the informational part of our memories—the facts and events—in the hippocampus neighborhood of the brain. The emotions connected to them—how we feel about those facts and events—are stored down the road in the amygdala. Scientists messed with some mice’s amygdalae and basically reversed how they “felt” about prior lab experiences, changing an unpleasant association into a pleasant one, and vice versa.

The scientists were quick to point out that while this could be useful in erasing a person’s negative emotions about something in their past (for PTSD sufferers, for example), it would be a bad idea to actually make them forget that these events had happened. Which means they must have gotten the message of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

People have always given names to the plants and animals around us. But as our study of the natural world has developed, we've realized that many of these names are wildly inaccurate. In fact, they often have less to say about nature than about the people who did the naming. Here’s a batch of these befuddling names.

1. COMMON NIGHTHAWK

There are two problems with this bird’s name. First, the common nighthawk doesn’t fly at night—it’s active at dawn and dusk. Second, it’s not a hawk. Native to North and South America, it belongs to a group of birds with an even stranger name: Goatsuckers. People used to think that these birds flew into barns at night and drank from the teats of goats. (In fact, they eat insects.)

2. IRISH MOSS

It’s not a moss—it’s a red alga that lives along the rocky shores of the northern Atlantic Ocean. Irish moss and other red algae give us carrageenan, a cheap food thickener that you may have eaten in gummy candies, soy milk, ice cream, veggie hot dogs, and more.

3. FISHER-CAT

Native to North America, the fisher-cat isn’t a cat at all: It’s a cousin of the weasel. It also doesn’t fish. Nobody’s sure where the fisher cat’s name came from. One possibility is that early naturalists confused it with the sea mink, a similar-looking creature that was an expert fisher. But the fisher-cat prefers to eat land animals. In fact, it’s one of the few creatures that can tackle a porcupine.

4. AMERICAN BLUE-EYED GRASS

American blue-eyed grass doesn’t have eyes (which is good, because that would be super creepy). Its blue “eyes” are flowers that peek up at you from a meadow. It’s also not a grass—it’s a member of the iris family.

5. MUDPUPPY

The mudpuppy isn’t a cute, fluffy puppy that scampered into some mud. It’s a big, mucus-covered salamander that spends all of its life underwater. (It’s still adorable, though.) The mudpuppy isn’t the only aquatic salamander with a weird name—there are many more, including the greater siren, the Alabama waterdog, and the world’s most metal amphibian, the hellbender.

6. WINGED DRAGONFISH

This weird creature has other fantastic and inaccurate names: brick seamoth, long-tailed dragonfish, and more. It’s really just a cool-looking fish. Found in the waters off of Asia, it has wing-like fins, and spends its time on the muddy seafloor.

7. NAVAL SHIPWORM

The naval shipworm is not a worm. It’s something much, much weirder: a kind of clam with a long, wormlike body that doesn’t fit in its tiny shell. It uses this modified shell to dig into wood, which it eats. The naval shipworm, and other shipworms, burrow through all sorts of submerged wood—including wooden ships.

8. WHIP SPIDERS

These leggy creatures are not spiders; they’re in a separate scientific family. They also don’t whip anything. Whip spiders have two long legs that look whip-like, but that are used as sense organs—sort of like an insect’s antennae. Despite their intimidating appearance, whip spiders are harmless to humans.

9. VELVET ANTS

There are thousands of species of velvet ants … and all are wasps, not ants. These insects have a fuzzy, velvety look. Don’t pat them, though—velvet ants aren’t aggressive, but the females pack a powerful sting.

10. SLOW WORM

The slow worm is not a worm. It’s a legless reptile that lives in parts of Europe and Asia. Though it looks like a snake, it became legless through a totally separate evolutionary path from the one snakes took. It has many traits in common with lizards, such as eyelids and external ear holes.

11. TRAVELER'S PALM

This beautiful tree from Madagascar has been planted in tropical gardens all around the world. It’s not actually a palm, but belongs to a family that includes the bird of paradise flower. In its native home, the traveler’s palm reproduces with the help of lemurs that guzzle its nectar and spread pollen from tree to tree.

12. VAMPIRE SQUID

This deep-sea critter isn’t a squid. It’s the only surviving member of a scientific order that has characteristics of both octopuses and squids. And don’t let the word “vampire” scare you; it only eats bits of falling marine debris (dead stuff, poop, and so on), and it’s only about 11 inches long.

13. MALE FERN & LADY FERN

Early botanists thought that these two ferns belonged to the same species. They figured that the male fern was the male of the species because of its coarse appearance. The lady fern, on the other hand, has lacy fronds and seemed more ladylike. Gender stereotypes aside, male and lady Ferns belong to entirely separate species, and almost all ferns can make both male and female reproductive cells. If ferns start looking manly or womanly to you, maybe you should take a break from botany.

14. TENNESSEE WARBLER

You will never find a single Tennessee warbler nest in Tennessee. This bird breeds mostly in Canada, and spends the winter in Mexico and more southern places. But early ornithologist Alexander Wilson shot one in 1811 in Tennessee during its migration, and the name stuck.

15. CANADA THISTLE

Though it’s found across much of Canada, this spiky plant comes from Europe and Asia. Early European settlers brought Canada thistle seeds to the New World, possibly as accidental hitchhikers in grain shipments. A tough weed, the plant soon spread across the continent, taking root in fields and pushing aside crops. So why does it have this inaccurate name? Americans may have been looking for someone to blame for this plant—so they blamed Canada.

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1. SOAKING IT UP; $7.49

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That mug of hot water might eventually be a drink for you, but first it’s a hot bath for your new friend, who has special pants filled with tea.